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In 1998 Berkshire Hathaway acquired a reinsurance company called General Re. “The only significant staff change that followed the merger was the elimination of General Re’s investment unit. Some 150 people had been in charge of deciding where to invest the company’s funds; they were replaced with just one individual – Warren Buffett.”
Robert G. Hagstrom in, “The Warren Buffett Way.”

Buffett was able to replace 150 people, and significantly outperform them, because they were conducting (relatively) small value, high volume transactions and he did the exact opposite.

Compare this with Gemini Waghmare’s thoughts on BSS, “It used to be that operators differentiated by pricing. Complex bundles, friends and family plans, rollover minutes and megabytes were used as ways to win over consumers. This drove significant investment into charging platforms and product catalogs. The internet economy runs on one-click purchases and a recurring flat rate. Roaming and overages are going away and transactional VOD (video on-demand) makes way for subscription VOD.
It’s not uncommon for operators to have 10,000 price plans while Netflix has three. Facebook and Google make billions of dollars without charging a cent.
Operators would do well to deprecate the value of their charging systems and invest instead in cloud and flat-rate billing with added focus on collecting, normalizing and monetizing user data. By simplifying subscription models with lightweight billing platforms, the scale and cost of BSS will drop dramatically. After all, there is no differentiation left in out-bundling competitors,” quoted here on Inform. There are some brilliant insights in this link, so I recommend you taking a closer look BTW.

10,000+ pricing plans definitely sounds like the equivalent to General Re before Buffett arrived. Having only 3 pricing plans would be more like the Buffett approach, change the dynamic of BSS tools and the size of the teams that use them! Having only 3 pricing plans would certainly change the dynamic for OSS too. The number of variants we’d be asked to handle would diminish, making it much easier to build and operate our OSS. Due to all the down-stream inefficiencies, you could actually argue that there is only negative-differentiation left in out-bundling competitors.

As an aside… Interesting comment that, “Facebook and Google make billions of dollars without charging a cent.” I’d beg to differ. Whilst consumers of the service aren’t billed, advertisers certainly are, which I assume still needs a billing engine… one that probably has quite a bit of algorithmic complexity.

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I’d like to get your opinion on this question – are OSS business tools or technical tools?

We can say that BSS are as the name implies – business support systems.
We can say that NMS / EMS / NEMS are network management tools – technical tools.

The OSS layer fits between those two layers . It’s where the business and technology worlds combine (collide??).

If we use the word Operations / Operational to represent the “O” in OSS, it might imply that they exist to help operate technology. Many people in the industry undoubtedly see OSS as technical, operational tools. If I look back to when I first started on OSS, I probably had this same perception – I primarily faced the OSS / NMS interface in the early days.

But change the “O” to operationalisation and it changes the perspective slightly. It encourages you to see that the technology / network is the means via which business models can be implemented. It’s our OSS that allow operationalisation to happen.

They’re both right? And therefore as OSS operators / developers / implementers, we need to expand our vision of what OSS do and who they service… which helps us get to Simon Sinek’s Why for OSS.

OSS of the past probably tended to be the point of collision and friction between business and tech groups within an organisation. Some modern OSS architectures give me the impression of being meet-in-the-middle tools, which will hopefully bring more collaboration between fiefdoms. Time will tell.

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How many OSS business cases have you seen that are built around cost reduction? Most of them??

Now let me ask the same question, but with one extra word included and see whether it completely inverts your answer. How many OSS business cases have you seen that are built on capital cost reduction? None of them?? Almost every “cost-out” business case is built on operational cost reduction (eg head-count reduction) – OPEX, not CAPEX – right?

So, you may ask, what does a CAPEX-reduction business case get built around? The benefits tend to be a little more obscure, but let’s see if they might work for you.

The first is probably also the most obvious – speed and cost of deployment. Not of the OSS itself, but all of the projects and micro-projects that the OSS helps to manage. If your OSS can systematically reduce deployment time and/or cost, then you get significant cost out

Asset utilisation – if you can find better ways to spread the load across your assets, then there’s less to spend on asset augmentation

Asset identification – you might be surprised at how many assets go missing and not necessarily through pilfering. I advised on a project where the payback period on a complete OSS was only a couple of months because the customer found a few very expensive pieces of equipment that were purchased, tested, physically connected (and having maintenance paid on) but never had services activated through them. The customer was just about to order a few more of the same devices to augment the network, but didn’t need to (a slightly different example of #2 above)

Cost justification of assets – to use historical and projected information to optimise new build (ie equipment purchase, deployment time, etc)

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NPS, or Net Promoter Score, has become commonly used in the telecoms industry in recent years. In effect, it is a metric that measures friction in the business. If NPS is high, the business runs more smoothly. Customers are happy with the service and want to buy more of it. They’re happy with the service so they don’t need to contact the business. If NPS is low, it’s harder to make sales and there’s the additional cost of time dealing with customer complaints, etc (until the customer goes away of course).

NPS can be easy to measure via survey, but a little more challenging as a near-real-time metric. What if we used customer contacts (via all channels such as phone, IVR, email, website, live-chat, etc) as a measure of friction? But more importantly, how does any of this relate to OSS / BSS? We’ll get to that shortly (I hope).

BSS (billing, customer relationship management, etc) and OSS (service health, network performance, etc) tend to be the final touchpoints of a workflow before reaching a customer. When the millions of workflows through a carrier are completing without customer contact, then friction is low. When there are problems, calls go up and friction / inefficiency is also going up. When there are problems, the people (or systems) dealing with the calls (eg contact centre operators) tend to start with OSS / BSS tools and then work their way back up the funnel to identify the cause of friction and attempt to resolve it.

The problem is that the OSS / BSS tools are often seen as the culprit because that’s where the issue first becomes apparent. It’s easier to log an issue against the OSS than to keep tracking back to the real source of the problem. Many times, it’s a case of shooting the messenger. Not only that, but if we’re not actually identifying the source of the problem then it becomes systemic (ie the poor customer experience perpetuates).

Maybe there’s a case for us to get better at tracking the friction caused further upstream of our OSS / BSS and to give more granular investigative tools to the call takers. Even if we do, our OSS / BSS are still the ones delivering the message.

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“CSPs’ needs in orchestration are evolving in parallel on several dimensions. These can be considered hierarchically. At the highest level is software that has an end-to-end service role, as is the case in the ONAP project. This software generally supports a service life-cycle perspective, containing functions from design and service creation, to provisioning and activation, to operations management, analysis, upgrade and evolution.
Beneath this tier, in a resource-facing sense, is software that simplifies deployment and operation of virtual system infrastructures in cloud-native applications, NFV, vco/CORD and MEC. This carries the overall tag of MANO and incorporates the domains of NFV (with NFVO, for deployment and operation of virtualized network functions) and virtualized infrastructure management (or VIM, for automating deployment and operation of virtual system infrastructures). Open source developments are significant at each of these layers of orchestration, and each contains a significant portion of the overall orchestration TAM.
In parallel is the functionality for managing hybrid virtual and physical infrastructures, which is the reality in most CSP environments. This can be thought of as a lateral branch to MANO for virtualized infrastructures in the orchestration stack.
Together these categories make up the TAM [Total Addressable Market] for orchestration solutions with CSPs. This is a high-priority area of focus for CSPs and is one of the highest growth areas of software innovation and development in support of their service delivery needs. We expect the TAM for orchestration software to triple from 2018 through 2023 at a CAGR of 32.5%. This is partially because of the nascent level of the offerings at the current time, as well as the high priority that CSPs and their vendor suppliers are placing on the domain.”
“Succeeding on an Open Field: The Impact of Open Source Technologies on the Communication Service Provider Ecosystem,” an ACG Research Report.

Whilst the title of this blog is just one of the headline numbers in this report by ACG Research, there are a number of other interesting call-outs, so it’s well worth having a closer read of the report.

The research has been funded by the Linux Foundation, so it naturally has a focus on open-source solutions for network operators (CSPs). Here’s another quote from the report relating to open-source, “The main motivations behind the push for open source solutions in CSP operations are not simply focused on cost reduction as a goal. CSPs are thinking strategically and globally. There is a realization that the competitive landscape for communication and information services is changing rapidly, and it includes global, webscale service providers and over-the-top solutions.
Leading CSPs want industry collaboration and cooperation to solve common challenges…
Their top three motivations are:
• Unifying multiple service providers around a common approach
• Avoiding vendor lock-in and dependencies on a single vendor
• Accessing a broader talent pool than your own organization or any one vendor could provide”

The first bullet-point is where the CSPs diverge from the likes of AWS and Google. Whilst the CSPs, each with their local geographical reach, seek global unification through standardisation (ie to ensure simpler interconnection), AWS and Google appear to be seeking global reach and global domination (making unification efforts irrelevant for them).

Just curious though. What if global domination does come to pass in the next few years? Will there be a three-fold increase in the orchestration market or complete decimation? Check out this earlier post that describes an OSS doomsday scenario.

Global CSPs have significant revenue streams that won’t disappear by 2023 and will be certain to put up a fight against becoming obsolescent under that doomsday scenario. It seems that open source and orchestration are key weapons in this global battle, so we’re bound to see some big investments in this space.

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“Insurer IAG has modelled the financial cost that a data breach or ransomware attack would have on its business, in part to understand how much proposed infosec investments might offset its losses.
Head of cybersecurity and governance Ian Cameron told IBM Think 2018 in Sydney that the “value-at-risk modelling” project called upon the company’s actuarial expertise to put numbers on different types and levels of security threats.
“Because we’re an insurance company, we can use actuarial methods to price or model what the costs of a loss event would be,” Cameron said.
“If we have a major data breach or a major ransomware attack, we’ve done some really great work in the past 12 months to model the net cost of losses to our organisation in terms of the loss of productivity, the cost of advertising to address the concerns of our customers, the legal costs, and the costs of regulatory oversight.
“We’ve been able to work out the distribution of loss from a small event to a very big event.”
Ry Crozier on IT News.

There are really only three main categories of benefit that an OSS can be built around:

Cost reduction

Revenue generation / increase

Brand value (ie insurance of the brand, via protection of customer perception of the brand)

The last on the list is rarely used (in my experience) to justify OSS/BSS investment. The IAG experience of costing out infosec risk to operations and brand is an interesting one. It’s also one that has some strong parallels for the OSS/BSS of network operators.

Many people in the telecoms industry treat OSS/BSS as an afterthought and/or an expensive cost centre. Those people fail to recognise that the OSS/BSS are the operationalisation engines that allow customers to use the network assets.

Just as IAG was able to do through actuarial analysis, a telco’s OSS/BSS team could “work out the distribution of loss from a small event to (be) a very big event” (for the telco’s brand value). Consider the loss of repute during sustained network outages. Consider the impact of negative word-of-mouth from billing mistakes. Consider how revenue leakage analysis and predictive network health management might offset losses.

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If I start talking about doomsday scenarios where the global OSS job industry is decimated, most people will immediately jump to the conclusion that I’m predicting an artificial intelligence (AI) takeover. AI could have a role to play, but is not a key facet of the scenario I’m most worried about.

You’d think that OSS would be quite a niche industry, but there must be thousands of OSS practitioners in my home town of Melbourne alone. That’s partly due to large projects currently being run in Australia by major telcos such as nbn, Telstra, SingTel-Optus and Vodafone, not to mention all the smaller operators. Some of these projects are likely to scale back in coming months / years, meaning less seats in a game of OSS musical chairs. But this isn’t the doomsday scenario I’m hinting at in the title either. There will still be many roles at the telcos and the vendors / integrators that support them.

There are hundreds of OSS vendors in the market now, with no single dominant player. It’s a really fragmented market that would appear to be ripe for M&A (mergers and acquisitions). Ripe for consolidation, but massive consolidation is still not the doomsday scenario because there would still be many OSS roles in that situation.

The doomsday scenario I’m talking about is one where only one OSS gains domination globally. But how?

Most traditional telcos have a local geographic footprint with partners/subsidiaries in other parts of the world, but are constrained by the costs and regulations of a wired or cellular footprint to be able to reach all corners of the globe. All that uniqueness currently leads to the diversity of OSS offerings we see today. The doomsday scenario arises if one single network operator usurps all the traditional telcos and their legacy network / OSS / BSS stacks in one technological fell swoop.

How could a disruption of that magnitude happen? I’m not going to predict, but a satellite constellation such as the one proposed by Starlink has some of the hallmarks of such a scenario. By using low-earth orbit (LEO) satellites (ie lower latency than geostationary satellite solutions), point-to-point laser interconnects between them and peering / caching of data in the sky, it could fundamentally change the world of communications and OSS.

It has global reach, no need for carrier interconnect (hence no complex contract negotiations or OSS/BSS integration for that matter), no complicated lead-in negotiations or reinstatements, no long-haul terrestrial or submarine cable systems. None of the traditional factors that cost so much time and money to get customers connected and keep them connected (only the complication of getting and keeping the constellation of birds in the sky – but we’ll put that to the side for now). It would be hard for traditional telcos to compete.

I’m not suggesting that Starlink can or will be THE ubiquitous global communications network. What if Google, AWS or Microsoft added this sort of capability to their strengths in hosting / data? Such a model introduces a new, consistent network stack without the telcos’ tech debt burdens discussed here. The streamlined network model means the variant tree is millions of times simpler. And if the variant tree is that much simpler, so is the operations model and so is the OSS… with one distinct contradiction. It would need to scale for billions of customers rather than millions and trillions of events.

You might be wondering about all the enterprise OSS. Won’t they survive? Probably not. Comms networks are generally just an important means-to-an-end for enterprises. If the one global network provider were to service every organisation with local or global WANs, as well as all the hosting they would need, and hosted zero-touch network operations like Google is already pre-empting, would organisation have a need to build or own an on-premises OSS?

One ubiquitous global network, with a single pared back but hyperscaled OSS, most likely purpose-built with self-healing and/or AI as core constructs (not afterthoughts / retrofits like for existing OSS). How many OSS roles would survive that doomsday scenario?

Do you have an alternative OSS doomsday scenario that you’d like to share?

Hat tip again to Jay Fenton for pointing out what Starlink has been up to.

It’s an interesting season as we come up to the EOFY (end of financial year – on 30 June). Budget cycles are coming to an end. At organisations that don’t carry un-spent budgets into the next financial year, the looming EOFY triggers a use-it-or-lose-it mindset.

In some cases, organisations are almost forced to allocate funds on OSS investments even if they haven’t always had the time to identify requirements and / or model detailed return projections. That’s normally anathema to me because an OSS‘ reputation is determined by the demonstrable value it creates for years to come. However, I can completely understand a client’s short-term objectives. The challenge we face is to minimise any risk of short-term spend conflicting with long-term objectives.

I take the perspective of allocating funds to build the most generally useful asset (BTW, I like Robert Kiyosaki’s simple definition of an asset as, “in reality, an asset is only something that puts money in your pocket,”) In the case of OSS, putting money in one’s pocket needs to consider earnings [or cost reductions] that exceed outgoings such as maintenance, licensing, operations, etc as well as cost of capital. Not a trivial task!

So this is where the farm equipment analogy comes in.

If we haven’t had the chance to conduct demand estimation (eg does the telco’s market want the equivalent of wheat, rice, stone fruit, etc) or product mix modelling (ie which mix of those products will bear optimal returns) then it becomes hard to predict what type of machinery is best fit for our future crops. If we haven’t confirmed that we’ll focus efforts on wheat, then it could be a gamble to invest big in a combine harvester (yet). We probably also don’t want to invest capital and ongoing maintenance on a fruit tree shaker if our trees won’t begin bearing fruit for another few years.

Therefore, a safer investment recommendation would be on a general-purpose machine that is most likely to be useful for any type of crop (eg a tractor).

In OSS terminology, if you’re not sure if your product mix will provision 100 customers a day or 100,000 then it could be a little risky to invest in an off-the-shelf orchestration / provisioning engine. Still potentially risky, but less so, would be to invest in a resource and service inventory solution (if you have a lot of network assets), alarm management tools (if you process a lot of alarms), service order entry, workforce management, etc.

Having said that, a lot of operators already have a strong gut-feel for where they intend to get returns on their investment. They may not have done the numbers extensively, but they know their market roadmap. If wheat is your specialty, go ahead and get the combine harvester.

I’d love to get your take on this analogy. How do you invest capital in your OSS without being sure of the projections (given that we’re never sure on projections becoming reality)?

“The global Internet of Things (IoT) market will be worth $1.1 trillion in revenue by 2025 as market value shifts from connectivity to platforms, applications and services. By that point, there will be more than 25 billion IoT connections (cellular and non-cellular), driven largely by growth in the industrial IoT market. The Asia Pacific region is forecast to become the largest global IoT region in terms of both connections and revenue.
Although connectivity revenue will grow over the period, it will only account for 5 per cent of the total IoT revenue opportunity by 2025, underscoring the need for operators to expand their capabilities beyond connectivity in order to capture a greater share of market value.”
GSMA Intelligence, referred to here.

Let’s look at these projected numbers. The GSMA Intelligence report forecasts only 5 cents in every dollar of IoT spend (of a $1.1T market opportunity) will be allocated to connectivity. That leaves $1.045T on the table if network operators just focus on connectivity.

Traditional OSS tend to focus on managing connectivity – less so on managing marketplaces, customer-facing platforms and applications. Does that headline number – $1.045T – provide you with an incentive to re-consider what your OSS manages and future use cases?

IoT requires slightly different OSS thinking:

Rather than integrating to a (relatively) small number of device types, IoT will have an almost infinite number of sensor types from a huge range of suppliers.

Rather than managing devices individually, their sheer volume means that devices will need to be increasingly managed in cohorts via policy controls.

Rather than a fairly narrow set of network-comms based services, functionality explodes into diverse areas like metering, vehicle fleets, health-care, manufacturing, asset controls, etc, etc so IoT controllers will need to be developed by a much longer-tail of suppliers (meaning open development platforms and/or scalable certification processes to integrate into the IoT controller platforms).

There are undoubtedly many, many additional differences.

Caveat: I haven’t evaluated the claims / numbers in the GSMA Intelligence report. This blog is just to prompt a thought-experiment around hypothetical projections.

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“For more than a century, economies of scale made the corporation an ideal engine of business. But now, a flurry of important new technologies, accelerated by artificial intelligence (AI), is turning economies of scale inside out. Business in the century ahead will be driven by economies of unscale, in which the traditional competitive advantages of size are turned on their head.
Economies of unscale are enabled by two complementary market forces: the emergence of platforms and technologies that can be rented as needed. These developments have eroded the powerful inverse relationship between fixed costs and output that defined economies of scale. Now, small, unscaled companies can pursue niche markets and successfully challenge large companies that are weighed down by decades of investment in scale — in mass production, distribution, and marketing.”
Hemant Taneja with Kevin Maney in their Sloan Review article, “The End of Scale.”

There are two pathways I can envisage OSS playing a part in the economies of unscale indicated in the Sloan Review quote above.

The first is the changing way of working towards smaller, more nimble organisations, which includes increasing freelancing. There are already many modularised activities managed within an OSS, such as field work, designs, third-party service bundling, where unscale is potentially an advantage. OSS natively manages all these modules with existing tools, whether that’s ticketing, orchestration, provisioning, design, billing, contract management, etc.

Add smart contract management and John Reilly’s value fabric will undoubtedly increase in prevalence. John states that a value fabric is a mesh of interwoven, cooperating organizations and individuals, called parties, who directly or indirectly deliver value to customers. It gives the large, traditional network operators the chance to be more creative in their use of third parties when they look beyond their “Not Invented Here” syndrome of the past. It also provides the opportunity to develop innovative supply and procurement chains (meshes) that can generate strategic competitive advantage.

The second comes with an increasing openness to using third-party platforms and open-source OSS tools within operator environments. The OSS market is already highly fragmented, from multi-billion dollar companies (by market capitalisation) through to niche, even hobby, projects. However, there tended to be barriers to entry for the small or hobbyist OSS provider – they either couldn’t scale their infrastructure or they didn’t hold the credibility mandated by risk averse network operators.

As-a-Service platforms have changed the scale dynamic because they now allow OSS developers to rent infrastructure on a pay-as-you-eat model. In other words, the more their customers consume, the more infrastructure an OSS supplier can afford to rent from platforms such as AWS. More importantly, this become a possibility because operators are now increasingly open to renting third-party services on shared (but compartmentalised / virtualised) infrastructure. BTW. When I say “infrastructure” here, I’m not just talking about compute / network / storage but also virtualisation, containerisation, databases, AI, etc, etc.

Similarly, the credibility barrier-to-entry is being pulled down like the Berlin Wall as operators are increasingly investing in open-source projects. There are large open-source OSS projects / platforms being driven by the carriers themselves (eg ONAP, OpenStack, OPNFV, etc) that are accommodative of smaller plug-in modules. Unlike the proprietary, monolithic OSS/BSS stacks of the past, these platforms are designed with collaboration and integration being front-of-mind.

However, there’s an element of “potential” in these economies of unscale. Andreas Hegerslikens open-source to the wild west, as many settlers seek to claim their patch of real-estate in an uncharted map. Andreas states further, “In theory, vendor interoperability from open source should be convenient — even harmonious — with innovations being shared like recipes. Unfortunately for many, the system has not lived up to this reality.”

Where do you sit on the potential of economies of unscale and open-source OSS?

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“In the past, business-oriented groups have had ideas about what they want to do and then they come to us… Now, they want to know what technology can bring to the table and then they’ll work on the business plan.
So there’s a big gap here. It’s a phenomenon that’s been happening in the last year and it’s an uncomfortable place for IT. We’re not used to having to lead in that way. We have been more in the order-taker business.”
Veenod Kurup, Liberty Global, Group CIO.

That’s a really thought-provoking insight from Veenod isn’t it? Technology driving the business rather than business driving the technology. Technology as the business advantage.

I’ll be honest here – I never thought I’d see that day although I… guess… as e-business increases, the dependency on tech increases in lockstep. I’m passionate about tech, but also of the opinion that the tech is only a means to an end.

So if what Veenod says is reflective of a macro-trend across all industry then he’s right in saying that we’re going to have some very uncomfortable situations for some tech experts. Many will have to widen their field of view from a tech-only vision to a business vision.

Maybe instead the business-oriented groups could just come to the OSS / BSS department and speak with our valuable tripods. After all, we own and run the information and systems where business (BSS) meets technology (OSS) right? Or as previously reiterated on this blog, we have the opportunity to take the initiative and demonstrate the business value within our OSS / BSS.

PS. hat-tip to Dawn Bushaus for unearthing the quote from Veenod in her article on Inform.

Professional services revenues are a great way of smoothing out the lumpy revenue streams of traditional OSS product companies. There’s just one problem though. Of all the vendors I’ve worked with, I’ve found that they always have a predilection – they either have a product mindset or a services mindset and struggle to do both well because the mindsets are quite different.

Not only that but we can break professional services into two categories:

Product-related services – the installation and commissioning of products; and

Consultancy-based services – the value-add services that drive business value from the OSS / BSS

Product companies provide product-related services, naturally. I can’t help but think that if we as an industry provided more of the consultancy-based services, we’d have more justification for greater spend on OSS / BSS (and smoother revenue streams in the process).

Having said that, PAOSS specialises in consultancy-based services (as well as install / commission / delivery services), so we’re always happy to help organisations that need assistance in this space!!

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Being an OSS product supplier to telecom operators is a tough business. There is a constant stream of outgoings on developer costs, cost of sale, general overheads, etc. Unfortunately revenue streams are rarely so smooth. In fact, they tend to be decidedly lumpy – unpredictable (in terms of timelines when forecasting inflows years in advance) but large spikes of income stemming from customer implementations.

Not only that, but the risks are high due to the complexity and unknowns of OSS implementation projects as well as the lack of repeatability that was discussed in yesterday’s post.

Enduringly valuable businesses achieve their status through predictable, diversified, recurring (and preferably growing) revenue streams, so they need to be objectives of our OSS business models.

Annual maintenance fees (usually in the order of 20-22% of up-front list prices) is the most common recurring revenue model used by OSS product suppliers. Transaction-based pricing is another common model.

Cloud subscription (consumption) based models are also becoming more common, although there are always challenges around convincing carriers of the security and sovereignty of such important tools and data being hosted off-site.

I’m fascinated with the platform-plays, like Salesforce, which is a mushrooming form of the subscription model because there’s an ecosystem (or marketplace) of sellers contributing to transaction volumes. OSS and BSS are the perfect platform play but I haven’t seen any built around this style of revenue model yet. [Please let me know if I’ve missed any].

It has also been interesting to observe Cisco’s market success on the back of a perceived revenue shift towards more software and services.

Whenever considering alternate revenue models, I refer back to this great image from Ross Dawson:
Do any apply to your OSS? Can any apply to your OSS?

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Tending to be a low-volume, high-customisation, high-uniqueness product, OSS has a significantly different selling proposition than most “box drop” products.

Can you imagine if OSS salespeople used any of these “great deal” propositions (as described by Gary Halbert)?“I’m going out of business.”
“I just had a fire and I’m having a fire sale.”
“I’m crazy.” (all used car dealers)
“I owe taxes and I’ve got to raise money fast to pay them.”
“I’ve lost my lease and I’ve got to sell this merchandise right away before it gets thrown into the sheet.”
“I’ve got to make space for some new merchandise that is arriving soon so I will sell you what I have on hand real cheap.”

Did the image of an OSS salesperson saying any of those, especially the first, bring a smile to your face?

Anyway, Gary’s article also goes on to say, “…I wrote: “and if you can find a way to use it, you can dramatically increase your sales volume.”
Now, compare that to this: “and if you can find a way to use it, you can make yourself a bushel of money!”
Isn’t that a lot more powerful? You bet! The words “dramatically increase your sales volume” do not even begin to conjure up the visual imagery of “a bushel of money.””

From what I’ve experienced on the client side of the buying equation, OSS selling propositions seem to be driven by functionality. I call it the functionality arms-race, where vendors compete on functionality rather than efficacy. In a way, it’s the “sales volume” variant mentioned by Gary above.

The other approach that does align more closely with the “bushel of money” variant is the cost-out discussion. It’s the, “if you implement this OSS, you’ll be able to reduce head-count in your operations team,” argument. That’s definitely important for any operator that sees their OSS as a cost-centre. However, it’s a “save a bushel of money” argument rather than the more powerful “make a bushel of money” argument.

In reply to a recent post, James Crawshaw of Light Reading wrote, “OSS/BSS represents around 2-3% of revenue and takes up around 10% of capex.” I initially read this as OSS/BSS contributing 2-3% of revenue (ie the higher the percentage the better). However, James clarified that our IT/OSS/BSS tend to consume 2-3% of revenue (ie the lower the percentage the better).

Can you imagine how these tiny wording/perspective differences could change the credibility of the whole OSS/BSS industry? As soon as our OSSmake a bushel of money, then the selling proposition becomes a whole lot stronger.

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“There are ratings and rankings that ostensibly exist to give us information (and we are supposed to use that information to change our behavior).
But if we don’t know what variables matter, how is it supposed to be useful?
Just because it can be easily measured with two digits doesn’t mean that it’s accurate, important or useful.
[Marketers learned a long time ago that people love rankings and daily specials. The best way to boost sales is to put something in a little box on the menu, and, when in doubt, rank things. And sometimes people even make up the rankings.]”
Seth Godin here.

Are there any rankings that are made up in OSS? Our OSS collect an amazing amount of data so there’s rarely a need to make up the data we present.

Are they based on hidden variables? Generally, we use raw counters and / or well known metrics so we’re usually quite transparent with what our OSS present.

What about when we’re trying to select the right vendor to fulfill the OSS needs of our organisation? As Seth states, Just because it can be easily measured with two digits* doesn’t mean that it’s accurate, important or useful. [* In this case, I’m thinking of a 2 x 2 matrix].

The interesting thing about OSS ranking systems is that there is so much nuance in the variables that matter. There are potentially hundreds of evaluation criteria and even vast contrasts in how to interpret a given criteria.

For example, a criteria might be “time to activate a service.” A vendor might have a really efficient workflow for activating single services manually but have no bulk load or automation interface. For one operator (which does single activations manually), the TTAS metric for that product would be great, but for another operator (which does thousands of activations a day and tries to automate), the TTAS metric for the same product would be awful.

As much as we love ranking systems… there are hundreds of products on the market (in some cases, hundreds of products in a single operator’s OSS stack), each fitting unique operator needs differently… so a 2 x 2 matrix is never going to cut it as a vendor selection tool… not even as a short-listing tool.

Better to build yourself a vendor selection framework. You can find a few OSS product / vendor selection hints here based on the numerous vendor / product selections I’ve helped customers with in the past.

If you did, then you may’ve also noticed a reference to Finland’s Elisa selling its automation smarts to other telcos. This is another interesting business model disruption for the OSS market, although I’ll reserve judgement on how disruptive it will be until Elisa sells to a few more operators.

What did catch my eye in the Elisa article (again by Light Reading’s Iain Morris), is this paragraph:Automation has not been hassle-free for Elisa. Instilling a software culture throughout the organization has been a challenge, acknowledges [Kirsi] Valtari. Rather than recruiting software expertise, Elisa concentrated on retraining the people it already had. During internal training courses, network engineers have been taught to code in Python, a popular programming language, and to write algorithms for a self-optimizing network (or SON). “The idea was to get engineers who were previously doing manual optimization to think about automating it,” says Valtari. “These people understand network problems and so it is a win-win outcome to go down this route.”.

It provides a really interesting perspective on this diagram below (from a 2014 post about the ideal skill-set for the future of networking)
There is an undoubted increase in the level of network / IT overlap (eg SDN). Most operators appear to be taking the path of hiring for IT and hoping they’ll grow to understand networks. Elisa is going the opposite way and training their network engineers to code.

With either path, if they then train their multi-talented engineers to understand the business (the red intersect), then they’ll have OSS experts on their hands right folks?? 😉

Like this:

“Google has started applying its artificial intelligence (AI) expertise to network operations and expects to make its tools available to companies building virtual networks on its global cloud platform.
That could be a troubling sign for network technology vendors such as Ericsson AB (Nasdaq: ERIC), Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. and Nokia Corp. (NYSE: NOK), which now see AI in the network environment as a potential differentiator and growth opportunity…
Google already uses software-defined network (SDN) technology as the bedrock of this infrastructure and last week revealed details of an in-development “Google Assistant for Networking” tool, designed to further minimize human intervention in network processes.
That tool would feature various data models to handle tasks related to network topology, configuration, telemetry and policy. .”
Iain Morrishere on Light Reading.

This is an interesting, but predictable, turn of events isn’t it? If (when?) automated network operations as a service (ANOaaS) is perfected, it has the ability to significantly change the OSS space doesn’t it?

Let’s have a look at this from a few scenarios (and I’m considering ANOaaS from the perspective of any of the massive cloud providers who are also already developing significant AI/ML resource pools, not just Google).

Large Enterprise, Utilities, etc with small networks (by comparison to telco networks), where the network and network operations are simply a cost of doing business rather than core business. Virtual networks and ANOaaS seem like an attractive model for these types of customer (ignoring data sovereignty concerns and the myriad other local contexts for now). Outsourcing this responsibility significantly reduces CAPEX and head-count to run what’s effectively non-core business. This appears to represent a big disruptive risk for the many OSS vendors who service the Enterprise / Utilities market (eg Solarwinds, CA, etc, etc).

T2/3 Telcos with relatively small networks that tend to run lean operations. In this scenario, the network is core business but having a team of ML/AI expects is hard to justify. Automations are much easier to build for homogeneous (consistent) infrastructure platforms (like those of the cloud providers) than for those carrying different technologies (like T2/T3 telcos perhaps?). Combine complexity, lack of scale and lack of large ML/AI resource pools and it becomes hard for T2/T3 telcos to deliver cost-effective ANOaaS either internally or externally to their customer base. Perhaps outsourcing the network (ie VNO) and ANOaaS allows these operators to focus more on sales?

T1 Telcos have large networks, heterogenous platforms and large workforces where the network is core business. The question becomes whether they can build network cloud at the scale and price-point of Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc. This is partly dependent upon internal processes, but also on what vendors like Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia can deliver, as quoted as a risk above.

As you probably noticed, I just made up ANOaaS. Does a term already exist for this? How do you think it’s going to change the OSS and telco markets?

“The actions taken by the telecom industry have mostly been around cost cutting, both in terms of opex and capex, and that has not resulted in breaking the curve. Too few activities has been centered around revenue growth, such as focused activities in personalization, customer experience, segmentation, targeted offerings that become part of or drive ecosystems. These activities are essential if you want to break the curve; thus, it is time to gear up for growth… I am very surprised that very few, if any, service providers today collect and analyze data, create dynamic targeted offerings based on real-time insights, and do that per segment or individual.”
Lars Sandstrom, here.

I have two completely opposite and conflicting perspectives on the pervading wisdom of personalised services (including segmentation of one and targeted offerings) in the telecoms industry.

Telcos tend to be large organisations. If I invest in a large organisation it’s because the business model is simple, repeatable and has a moat (as Warren Buffett likes to say). Personalisation is contra to two of those three mantras – personalisation makes our OSS/BSS far more complicated and hence less repeatable (unless we build in lots of automations, which BTW, are inherently more complex).

I’m more interested in reliable and enduring profitability than just revenue growth (not that I’m discounting the search for revenue growth of course). The complexity of personalisation leads to significant increases in systems costs. As such, you’d want to be really sure that personalisation is going to give an even larger up-tick in revenues (ie ROI). Seems like a big gamble to me.

For my traditional telco services, I don’t want personalised, dynamic offers that I have to evaluate and make decisions on regularly. I want set and forget (mostly). It’s a bit like my electricity – I don’t want to constantly choose between green electricity, blue electricity, red electricity – I just want my appliances to work when I turn on the switch and not have bill shock at the end of the month / quarter. In telco, it’s not just green / blue / red. We seem to want to create the millions of shades of the rainbow, which is a nightmare for OSS/BSS implementers.

I can see the argument however for personalisation in what I’ll call the over-the-top services (let’s include content and apps as well). Telcos tend to be much better suited to building the platforms that support the whole long tail than selecting individual winners (except perhaps supply of popular content like sport broadcasts, etc).

So, if I’m looking for a cool, challenging project or to sell some products or services (you’ll notice that the quote above is on a supplier’s blog BTW), then I’ll definitely recommend personalisation. But if I want my telco customers to be reliably profitable…

Am I taking a short-term view on this? Is personalisation going to be expected by all end-users in future, leaving providers with no choice but to go down this path??

Like this:

A few years ago, I read a book that had a big impact on the way I thought about OSS and OSS product development. Funnily enough, the book had nothing to do with OSS or product development. It was a book about marketing – a subject that I wasn’t very familiar with at the time, but am now fascinated with.

The premise behind the book is that when we go on a trip into the countryside, we notice the first brown or black cows, but after a while we don’t pay attention to them anymore. The novelty has worn off and we filter them out. But if there was a purple cow, that would be remarkable. It would definitely stand out from all the other cows and be talked about. Seth promoted the concept of building something into your products that make them remarkable, worth talking about.

I recently heard an interview with Seth. Despite the book being launched in 2003, apparently he’s still asked on a regular basis whether idea X is a purple cow. His answer is always the same – “I don’t decide whether your idea is a purple cow. The market does.”

That one comment brought a whole new perspective to me. As hard as we might try to build something into our OSS products that create a word-of-mouth buzz, ultimately we don’t decide if it’s a purple cow concept. The market does.

So let me ask you a question. You’ve probably seen plenty of different OSS products over the years (I know I have). How many of them are so remarkable that you want to talk about them with your OSS colleagues, or even have a single feature that’s remarkable enough to discuss?

There are a lot of quite brilliant OSS products out there, but I would still classify almost all of them as brown cows. Brilliant in their own right, but unremarkable for their relative sameness to lots of others.

The two stand-out purple cows for me in recent times have been CROSS’ built-in data quality ranking and Moogsoft’s Incident Room model. But it’s not for me to decide. The market will ultimately decide whether these features are actual purple cows.

I’d love to hear about your most memorable OSS purple cows.

You may also be wondering how to go about developing your own purple OSS cow. Well I start by asking, “What are people complaining about?” or “What are our biggest issues?” That’s where the opportunities lie. Once discovering those issues, the challenge is solving the problem/s in an entirely different, but better, way. I figure that if people care enough to complain about those issues, then they’re sure to talk about any product that solves the problem for them.

“Brand, marketing, pricing and sales were seen as sexy. Networks and IT were the geeks no one seemed to speak to or care about. … This isolation and excommunication of our technical team had created an environment of disillusion. If you wanted something done the answer was mostly ‘No – we have no budget and no time for that’. Our marketing team knew more about loyalty points … than about our own key product, the telecommunications network.”
Olaf Swantee, from his book, “4G Mobile Revolution”

Great note here (picked up by James Crawshaw at Heavy Reading). It talks about the great divide that always seems to exist between Sales / Marketing and Network / Ops business units.

I’m really excited about the potential for next generation OSS / orchestration / NaaS (Network as a Service) architectures to narrow this divide though.

In this case:

The Network is offered as a microservice (let’s abstractly call them Resource Facing Services [RFS]);

There’s a catalog / orchestration layer that marries the CFS with the cohesive set of RFS

The third layer becomes a meet-in-the-middle solution where Sales / Marketing comes together with Network / Ops – and where they can discuss what customers want and what the network can provide.

The RFS are suitably abstracted that Sales / Marketing doesn’t need to understand the network and complexity that sits behind the veil. Perhaps it’s time for Networks / Ops to shine, where the RFS can be almost as sexy as CFS (am I falling too far into the networks / geeky side of the divide? 🙂 )

The CFS are infinitely composable from RFS (within the constraints of the RFS that are available), allowing Sales / Marketing teams to build whatever they want and the Network / Ops teams don’t have to be constantly reacting to new customer offerings.

I wonder if this revolution will give Olaf cause to re-write this section of his book in a few years, or whether we’ll still have the same cultural divide despite the exciting new tools.